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Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

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Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#141

Post by cjbgkagh »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #133
cjbgkagh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worse than that, it’s the citizenry subsidizing the business as the business can pay less by offering immigration as part of the package which is desirable due to the investments of the citizenry. The citizenry has to compete with a service they’re subsidizing.

Immigrants subsidize the citizenry. They pay enormous amounts of taxes, and consume no welfare.

I don’t believe those numbers, economics is terrible at measuring ‘but for’ conditionals. Statistics will tell you whatever you need if you torture it enough. As a former immigrant employee to the US I felt the intended wage suppression first hand. But for the large numbers of immigrants would a wage shortage lead to more taxes paid by citizenry? As I’m now an employer and not an employee I get the benefit of the wage suppression and it’s very real. It also prevents others from saving enough to do the same which is also of personal benefit for me but bad for society which I assume would be bad for me long term…

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#142

Post by photonbucket »

coderintherye wrote: post #109
re-thc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing. You can offer them a different visa? H1B isn't the ONLY option. It's only being used because it's not a "key" position.

What different visa option are you referring to? Specifically, as noted in the parent comment when referring to workers from India.

Presumably the O-1 visa

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#143

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Gigachad wrote: post #13
TexanFeller wrote: post #7

Once you switch to full remote, why not hire from Central and South America at maybe 1/4 the price of a Californian.

Americans like to think they have a monopoly on skilled programmers. But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price. Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.

> and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.

For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.

Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#144

Post by wheels »

coderintherye wrote: post #109
re-thc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing. You can offer them a different visa? H1B isn't the ONLY option. It's only being used because it's not a "key" position.

What different visa option are you referring to? Specifically, as noted in the parent comment when referring to workers from India.

EB-1 ("Executive") or O-1 ("Genius").

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#145

Post by protastus »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #36
ivalm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not really how it works. It’s hard to be fine-grained when firing 12k people. It’s operational much easier to do the layoff and then fix the gaps.

Indeed, the gist of my complaint to my Congressional reps is going to be “Google appears incapable of managing Human Resources at scale and defaults instead to hiring folks on visas at the same time letting a bunch of existing domestic workers go.” “Too hard” to sorting hat a subset of 12k employees into other roles and slash and burn instead? You shouldn’t get H1B quota. We are coming up on an election cycle after a…

Big tech does have such a mechanism. The individuals laid off generally get a couple of months to find a new job within the company. In these times there are few open positions but many do get filled by internal applicants who were laid off.

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#146

Post by bsder »

belltaco wrote: post #65
stefan_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make a difference to the H-1B requirements. No other domestic worker could do the same job? It's a scam.

That's not the requirement. It's frustrating to see otherwise smart people on every single tech board ever since decades to not understand work visa and employment green card requirements and the difference between them.

I understand perfectly. And I still firmly believe that companies should immediately and completely lose ANY access to the visa pipelines if they do a layoff.

If visa holders are that important to the company, then the company will figure out how to not do a layoff, no?

Of course, I'm also someone who believes that visa holders should be granted green card status within 24 months tops--none of this 7 years of indentured servitude bullshit. Green cards like this would shut down 90+% of the companies abusing the visa process in the US.

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#147

Post by Aperocky »

kasey_junk wrote: post #82
darth_avocado wrote: post #17

There are multiple missing things for this: 1. Layoffs happened regardless of visa status, so visa workers were part of the layoffs. 2. The visa applications for H1B could be for workers already working in the company under a different visa like TN or F1 3. The positions affected by layoffs and positions filing for H1B could be different. For example, a front end position may be affected by layoffs, but the visa appl…

I don’t necessarily believe this position but not a single one of your points argues against the theory that H1b visas are bad for green card/citizen holders during times of layoffs. It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders…

> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first

Elon Musk didn't get laid off in the 2000-01 tech bubble presumably because he was good? But maybe it should be perfectly "logical" to send him home.

Incredibly short sighted take, the US have doubled the population in the past 60 years, are we running a 50% unemployment rate? The selective immigration have hugely benefited the US and its native population.

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#148

Post by ipaddr »

makeitdouble wrote: post #122
bitL wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That risk is eliminated with foreign contractors. It's import/export of services.

On an individual basis that makes sense (in particular if you really handle it like a service exchange contract, with little to no management on how the person do their work) In this day and age though, I wonder how much it actually works . For instance if one of your contractor does something completely illegal in your country and you get media backlash for it, you're in a tight position if that thing was perfectly…

That seems so rare it is not worth worrying about

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#149

Post by dghlsakjg »

bitL wrote: post #44
makeitdouble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on principle. To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ? The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing…

You don't have to. Your foreign workers can be independent consultants receiving money from you, paying their own taxes. You just need their W-8BEN every year.

That makes them compliant with American law. Your company may still not be in compliance with local law (which can differ significantly in the liberal interpretation of what the us thinks a contractor is), and that can cause serious issues.

Re: Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

#150

Post by gknapp »

belltaco wrote: post #65
stefan_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make a difference to the H-1B requirements. No other domestic worker could do the same job? It's a scam.

That's not the requirement. It's frustrating to see otherwise smart people on every single tech board ever since decades to not understand work visa and employment green card requirements and the difference between them.

That is the requirement. The law applies standards to ensure that domestic workers aren't adversely impacted by the hiring of foreign workers. This includes putting essentially bogus ads in newspaper classifieds, and requires that they're paying the same to H1-B workers in the same role as a domestic worker, among other comical things.

The program has defacto evolved to one in which the US can tap into a skilled global labor market to increase competition for roles, without paying too much attention to the actual legal requirements.

Sources:

(Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa)

[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/the-h-1b-vis...

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